Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS)

6. age-adjusted sickness in the steam engine makers' society, 1852-75

The least problematic source of information on patterns of sickness pre-1914 are the records of early sickness insurance schemes, operated by trade unions and friendly societies. However, while crude rates of sickness among the membership of individual branches are available for a number of organisations such data are hard to interpret without data on the age-structure of each branch; without this, the obvious explanation of any spatial variation is that branches with high rates were simply those with a large number of elderly members.

The following map derives from another large project directed by Humphrey Southall, based on the membership records of the Steam Engine Makers' Society, a small national union of engineering workers. The SEM was founded in Liverpool in 1824 and merged with the Amalgamated Engineers in 1920. Between 1835 and 1920, it published an Annual Report which listed by name the membership of each branch, and also recorded every benefit payment, giving type of benefit, branch, date of payment, period covered and the name of the member. All this information has been assembled into a database which currently covers the period 1835-1876, and then the records relating to each individual member linked together to provide a life history.

However, in order to compare towns we must limit the analysis to members of known age. Ages were taken from four sources: funeral benefit payments; death certificates for members whose funerals were recorded but without an age; the union's admissions registers; and the initial membership register of the Amalgamated Engineers, which includes members who transferred when the Amalgamated Engineers were established in 1851. The index mapped below was computed by calculating the ratio of the sickness rate for members of a given age in each town with the rate for the union as a whole, and then averaging this ratio over all ages.

NB further work with the database may be able to both extend the number of towns covered and make the calculation more reliable, both being affected by the relatively small number of members whose ages are currently known. Even so, the map does support the view that high morbidity was positively correlated with high mortality.